Modern vehicles include electronics to control functionality ranging from operation and movement of the vehicles, to passenger convenience features, such as lights, power door locks, powers windows, power seats, or the like. These electronics can include embedded systems, for example, implement by electronic control units (ECUs), configured or programmed to perform dedicated functions within the vehicles.
The electronic control units, in some examples, can implement a standardized AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture) layered software architecture, for example, having an application layer, a runtime environment (RTE) layer, and a basic software (BSW) layer. An electronic control unit can communicate with other electronic control units in the vehicle utilizing at least one software module in the basic software (BSW) layer, such as an AUTOSAR communication (COM) module. For example, a vehicle can include a wiring harness having at least one communication bus to allow electronic control units to exchange of data packets or frames, called interaction protocol data units (I-PDUs) in the AUTOSAR standard, utilizing a controller area network (CAN) protocol, a local interconnect network (LIN) protocol, a FlexRay protocol, or the like. The AUTOSAR communication module implemented by a general-purpose processor in the electronic control unit can perform the transmission and reception operations for the electronic control unit.
The interaction protocol data units exchanged between electronic control units over a communication bus can be packed with multiple different pieces of information related to the vehicle, each piece of information can be called a signal value. For example, sensors in a vehicle can detect various conditions of the vehicle, such as vehicle speed, tire pressure, temperature, or the like, which can be provided to a corresponding electronic control unit. The electronic control unit, for example, via implementation of the runtime environment, can determine to transmit the detected vehicle conditions to another electronic control unit in the vehicle, and utilize the detected vehicle conditions as signal values for an interaction protocol data unit.
The electronic control unit can receive signal values from the runtime environment layer and can pack the interaction protocol data unit with the signal values for transmission over the communication bus, for example, implementing the AUTOSAR communication module. The electronic control unit, for example, implementing the AUTOSAR communication module, also can unpack one or more signal values from an interaction protocol data units received from the communication bus and provide the unpacked signal values to the runtime environment layer of the electronic control unit.
These vehicle network communication operations performed by the electronic control unit implementing the AUTOSAR communication module can be resource-intensive and time-consuming. While the “general-purpose” nature of embedded processors in electronic control units can be attractive due to their ability to be reconfigured relatively quickly and implement a wide-array of complex tasks, such as implementing the AUTOSAR standard software architecture, the tradeoffs for this embedded processor flexibility are complexity and inefficiency. The ability to do almost anything comes at the cost of being able to do a few simple things efficiently. As sophistication of automotive electronics increases, a volume of vehicle network traffic between an increasing number of electronic control units can consume a disproportionate amount of the processing resources of those electronic control units, often at the expense of other functionality performed by the electronic control units.